Senate amends big transportation funding bill

The Senate has voted overwhelmingly to approve only amendments proposed by Senate Transportation Bert Brackett, R-Rogerson, to his big transportation funding bill, SB 1188. Brackett’s amendments removed several items from the measure nicknamed the “kitchen sink” bill, because it contained so many different transportation funding mechanisms, partly because concerns were raised over whether some of those revenue measures technically would have been required to start in the House, not in Senate legislation. Those included a local-option sales tax for road projects, exemption of road materials from sales tax, $200 million in general-obligation bonds, and more.

Brackett told the Senate, “What’s left is the $300 million GARVEE (bonding) authority, moving state police onto the sales tax revenue stream, and the surplus eliminator with a five-year sunset. And an OPE study evaluation on LHTAC.”

With that, the amendments were approved. Sen. Shawn Keough, R-Sandpoint, had also filed two other amendments to the bill, but withdrew them just as the Senate was about to take them up.

Also during its amending order today, the Senate agreed to amendments proposed by Sen. Cliff Bayer, R-Boise, to HB 67a, the grocery tax repeal bill (that started out in the House as an income tax cut bill). Bayer said the amendments adjusted provisions dealing with revenue sharing to local government and correcting some timelines.  Ironically, they were structured as another “radiator cap” – a replacement for the entire text of the bill, just like the first amendment that converted the measure into a grocery tax repeal bill.

“It has the amendment addressing the percentage distribution for local revenue-sharing,” Bayer told the Senate, “to hold those distributions even. That is the intent. That language has been confirmed through a formal assessment in LSO.”

After the Senate completed its work in the amending order, Senate Majority Leader Bart Davis, R-Idaho Falls, asked to hold SB 1162 – the alternate transportation funding bill that contains only the authorization for an additional $300 million in GARVEE bonding, through which the state borrows against its future federal highway allocations to fund big road projects up-front – until tomorrow afternoon, and the Senate agreed. “We’ll let the other bill catch up,” Davis said, referring to the just-amended SB 1188. “Depending on actions on the floor, 1162 will be pulled back to committee.”